9/11 Artifact to Be Displayed in City Hall

Mayor Ralph Suozzi said he will find a place in City Hall to display a World Trade Center artifact gifted to the city in 2002 while it awaits its permanent home at the waterfront.

Zefy Christopoulos, who worked at the Mayor's Office when the artifact was donated, chided Suozzi at the last City Council meeting for keeping the artifact locked up in an office and not on public view.

"The artifact certainly deserves a better location than in a bag than in a closet," she said.

Suozzi said he had the artifact examined for DNA traces by the New York City Medical Examiner about two years ago to determine if it could be linked to a victim. No usable DNA was found and the artifact was returned to Glen Cove.

Since then, he said, the artifact has been safely in the Deputy Mayor's office in the canvas bag it came in awaiting a permanent place at Glen Cove's waterfront. The ferry terminal was the site of an evacuation effort by the people of Glen Cove to bring in more than 2,000 people from lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001.

Two designs have been created for a monument. The initial design was drafted by Glen Cove Resident Phil Gavosto, an architect who also designed the Nassau County WTC Memorial in Eisenhower Park. A subsequent design was drafted by North Shore Monuments at the request of Ralph Suozzi who was at that time unaware of the original design. 

In Gavosto's design, the artifact would be placed on a glass block surrounded by benches, according to Christopoulos.

Suozzi said the artifact is not being purposefully sequestered, and agreed that it deserves a temporary display site while awaiting its permanent home. He hopes to display the artifact in the Main Camber of City Hall by the next City Council meeting.

"There's no reason why it can't have a temporary home where it's visible to everyone else," Suozzi said.

Christopoulos was satisfied with the action, but said it should have been done years ago.

"The time to have done that would have been every 9/11 since it was given, and every 9/11 since he became Mayor," she said. 

Glen Cove has three artifacts from the Sept. 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks. Two were gifted by an anonymous donor in 2002: one to the Glen Cove Fire Department and one to City Hall. The third was donated to the Chamber of Commerce in 2011 and was installed in a monument in Pratt Park in 2013.